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COVID-19 has had broad disruptive effects on economies, healthcare systems, governments, societies, and individuals. Uncertainty concerning the scale of this crisis has given rise to countless rumors, hoaxes, and misinformation. Much of this type of conversation and misinformation about the pandemic now occurs online and in particular on social media platforms like Twitter. This study analysis incorporated a data-driven approach to map the contours of misinformation and contextualize the COVID-19 pandemic with regards to socio-religious-political information. This work consists of a combined system bridging quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess how information-exchanging behaviors can be used to minimize the effects of emergent misinformation. The study revealed that the social media platforms detected the most significant source of rumors in transmitting information rapidly in the community. It showed that WhatsApp users made up about 46% of the source of rumors in online platforms, while, through Twitter, it demonstrated a declining trend of rumors by 41%. Moreover, the results indicate the second-most common type of misinformation was provided by pharmaceutical companies; however, a prevalent type of misinformation spreading in the world during this pandemic has to do with the biological war. In this combined retrospective analysis of the study, social media with varying approaches in public discourse contributes to efficient public health responses.

Recent developments and studies in brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies have facilitated emotion detection and classification. Many BCI studies have sought to investigate, detect, and recognize participants’ emotional affective states. The applied domains for these studies are varied, and include such fields as communication, education, entertainment, and medicine. To understand trends in electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition system research and to provide practitioners and researchers with insights into and future directions for emotion recognition systems, this study set out to review published articles on emotion detection, recognition, and classification. The study also reviews current and future trends and discusses how these trends may impact researchers and practitioners alike. We reviewed 285 articles, of which 160 were refereed journal articles that were published since the inception of affective computing research. The articles were classified based on a scheme consisting of two categories: research orientation and domains/applications. Our results show considerable growth of EEG-based emotion detection journal publications. This growth reflects an increased research interest in EEG-based emotion detection as a salient and legitimate research area. Such factors as the proliferation of wireless EEG devices, advances in computational intelligence techniques, and machine learning spurred this growth.